AAM Meetings

In 2009, when I went to the National Preservation Conference, I had a sickening revelation. I did not run into a single person that I knew. During the two years that I had been in the Turks and Caicos, my entire ten previous years of networking efforts were gone.

This week was the first museum conference that I have attended since the Society of American Archivists meeting in August 2009. What I was very pleased to find, is that I ran into a few people that I knew, and who remembered me. I ran into a past employee of the Ohio Historical Society. I was able to speak to the past director of one of the Smithsonian museums that I had met while teaching at Capital University. And two of the design companies that had really, really nice displays were from Ohio. I had worked with both of them on previous museums.

There were several venders selling technological hardware and software for museum exhibits. For my entire budget, for instance, you can buy a wall of LED panels where you can interact with digital images of your collections by touching and moving them. It was like a giant touch screen that has a life span of 7-8 years.

I walked up to one kiosk and was like, "Hey, a giant I-phone."

"People keep saying that," the lady said, "but we really just mounted this display sideways because of space."

All I could think about was how cool it would be to have a giant I-phone in your exhibit where you could use apps on a giant scale. Then, stuff that you liked you could buy for your smart phone right on the exhibit floor to take with you.

I also went to a speed networking session where you sat and talked to some other museum professional for five minutes. You know, just like the speed dating scene in the movie "Hitch," where Will Smith confronts his protagonist. It was just like that, only about my real life, and not the life I talk about when people ask me if that movie is about me.

Anyway this was great. I had not signed up, but I went anyway. The organizers gave me the time sheet for someone who had not shown up. This person must have been foreign. Almost all ten people I met were from international museums; one from Columbia, one from Israel, and several who were there on the Getty Multicultural Undergraduate Intern Program.

By far the greatest contact was the director of archaeology museums from Nepal. We wound up sitting across from each other twice. Like me, he is not an archaeologist, but has now found himself leading a national program for archaeology museums. We had two really great five minute conversations. I told him I would love to come to Nepal...

because Deneen would just love that.